


Brain

by Cyrelia_J



Series: Rain Inside Your Eyes [1]
Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: Angst, Anxiety, Gen, Genetic Engineering, Language, Needles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-31
Updated: 2018-03-31
Packaged: 2019-04-16 03:14:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,036
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14155422
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cyrelia_J/pseuds/Cyrelia_J
Summary: Inspired by Banks' song "Brain". Originally posted on Tumblr now with extra garashir hints hahaTwenty seven days of the month, Julian Bashir is an average Starfleet doctor. On the twenty eighth day that starts to slip. On the twenty ninth, it slips a little more. And on the thirtieth, Julian has to suppress it all or risk being found out.Just a little canon explanation of why we might not see signs of Julian's enhancements the first few seasons.Minor garashir pining on Julian's part but mostly just Julian angst.





	Brain

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, it's a songfic. Yes, it's 2018. Don't judge me >>;

_But it's all the same_

_I could have foreseen_

_That you would act like you are_

 

On the first day Julian is calm, confident, and everything that he’s supposed to be. He can keep the anxiety under control and everything around him passes by in a dull happy hum. The twenty eighth day is when everything starts to slip. On the twenty eighth day he starts to be afraid. Everything is louder. Everything is sharper, and he starts to remember things that he’d wished he’d forgotten. The twenty ninth day the station looks like a nightmare dreamscape where the walls move and everyone stares through him with hollow eyes. The twenty ninth day he can start to hear the whispers and everyone whispers his name. The twenty ninth day he starts to feel the temptation to skip the thirtieth day because the twenty ninth day is still too soon but it’s also too close. 

The thirtieth day is the worst. On the thirtieth day Julian snaps awake at six hundred hours with his heart racing: because he can hear his neighbors moving through the walls and he can hear the hum of the station so loud that he can’t breathe. The thirtieth day is when it all catches up to him and he can feel his skin start to crawl like it will all fall of like some diseased husk. The thirtieth day is when Julian can see in near perfect darkness and the thirtieth day is when his mind races with numbers and memories and calculations that are so quick and immediate it’s a torture. The thirtieth day is when he’s close to breaking and has to be double careful not to break anyone else.

His respirations are too high today. He could hear himself breathing more loudly than normal from the moment he woke up. He’s been like that all day. He always is on the last day. He went through the day wondering if this will be the day when they’ll hear him. He wonders if this is when he’ll slip up and they’ll see him. There are others like him who can hear, who can see like the mythical figures of Earth’s old horror stories. His aunt would tell him those scary stories in the kitchen over shortbreads and tea. She would tell him about the monsters like him. They’re the undead who live for hundreds of years in the shadows. Julian used to wonder if that isn’t why he chose the darkness of space over the light of Earth. They’re cold, they’re silent, and they can hear the muscles of their enemies moving before they strike. They can see in perfect darkness and can hear the hearts of their prey beating out of fear. One day they’ll hear his and they’ll come for him. 

 

_Oh so cool you seem_

_Blending with that scene_

_Wearing what you think is hard_

 

Julian stands out. He’s too smart, too strong, too fast. He isn’t careful enough. He doesn’t know when to stay silent. He accidentally broke a glass in the replimat when he thought that Garak was finally going to ask him to dinner. He ripped an expensive scarf like it was paper when he thought Garak was going to kiss him. He beat Chief O’Brien far too easily in racquetball. He was just a little too precise with the darts. Before that and before that is nothing but near misses. He has to control it or they’ll find him out. They’ll hate him. Maybe they already hate him. Maybe they’re already going to come for him when they know that he’s weak. Maybe that’s what they’re waiting for. 

No, They like him now. They didn’t like him before. They didn’t accept him before. He’s one of them. He’s not weird, he’s not trying too hard, he’s not better than they are. Julian runs his hands nervously over his knees. They feel cold. Maybe he’s already one of the undead. Maybe his cells will keep changing until his heart no longer beats and the whole world becomes ice. He sits on his sofa nude because he’s torn his clothes off from the pain before. He’s cold. He thinks of Garak and wishes that he could tell him how cold the serums make him. He wishes he could tell Garak how warm he feels when he’s around him.

Julian shuts his eyes tightly on the sofa trying to breathe more calmly. If the muscle is tight it will hurt more. The hypospray was the easy part. It was just a quick shot to the back of his neck and the rush of information through his brain quieted back down. He tried to think of the square root of two hundred thousand and came up with nothing but a faint buzz and a blank. He tried to remember what Garak had for lunch two weeks ago and couldn’t. He was safe. Another thirty days his mind is safe. His mind is the easy one. The hard one is the rest of his body. 

 

_I can see you struggling_

_Boy, don't hurt your brain_

_Thinking what you're gonna say_

 

Julian takes the first syringe and the small vial from the table and stares hard at it. His lips are pressed together tightly as he makes sure he has the eighteen gauge for this one. It needs to be an intramuscular injection and no matter what he tells himself, it’s going to hurt. There’s too much to going at once but it has to be thirty days exactly. Julian has had to adjust the dosages, the formulations but he always has to be able to make thirty days. He’s terrified that a day may come when he won’t be able to make it that long. He would never tell him especially now that it’s gone but he envied Garak his implant. An implant that could deliver everything straight into him on command would make this easy. Julian had almost started to try and figure one out from his research on Garak’s failed one before he forced himself to stop.

He watches the clear liquid go in keeping his hands steady. He has to stop when he stops being able to see. Sometimes the contacts to dull his vision to standard parameters hurt his eyes. Julian hates wearing them but he can’t risk surgery. He can’t risk anyone finding out what he is. But he can’t do it himself. And, a small traitorous part of him thinks, he’s afraid of permanently losing his gifts. Sometimes the waver in his eyesight is tears that he doesn’t dare to shed. Not for the pain. He’s gotten used to the pain since the Academy when he developed the serums to temporarily reverse the effects of his enhancements. He can’t alter himself back at the cellular level but he can fake it.

No, the tears are those miserable self pitying things that a man feels when he’s all alone in the world surrounded by a station full of people that will never understand him. The unshed tears are for the disease eating him alive- that desire to be normal, to be nothing but a man free to act upon everything he wants. Julian Bashir, simple Starfleet doctor could have anyone he wanted, be anything he wanted. But Tain already knew too much about him with the little that he’d allowed everyone to see. Tain is too sharp, Garak too shrewd, too self serving, too _dangerous_. He’s ethylene glycol, sweet, tempting, slipping down the throat seductively metabolizing to calcium oxalate crystals and ripping his insides out. A little on the tongue and Julian wants more but anymore and he knows he won’t survive.

 

_'Cause everything's a game_

_Always trying to calculate_

 

Julian shuts his eyes tightly as he finishes filling the syringe. He shakes his head with a small sound of frustration escaping. Fourteen days ago Garak nearly died. Fourteen days ago Julian wasn’t fast enough. He wasn’t strong enough. He wasn’t _smart_ enough. It wasn’t the first time. It won’t be the last. He feels like a man standing on the edge of a riverbank watching another drown when he could’ve saved him. Because he’s pathetic and scared and he’s made his body unable to swim against the rough water when it used to be able to. He can hear his father chastising him for denying his “gifts”, for spitting in the face of the sacrifices that he and his mother made so that Julian would have every advantage in life. He hears his father taunting him, his voice so vivid and real that he feels like a ghost hovering at Julian’s side. 

Julian feels another sound in his throat that feels like a sob threatening to wrench loose. People die for his secrets. He’s a coward. That’s what his father says to him. He’s a monster. That’s what he answers in return. Julian carefully twists the needle off switching out the twenty five gauge. He cleans the injection site- the top of his thigh- quickly with the alcohol. He doesn’t have a choice, he tells Richard Bashir in his head like a sad scared child. He has to do this. 

Julian jams the needle in almost angrily, too tense, too tense, good, let it fucking hurt, let it hurt because he hates this, he hates what his father did to him, he hates his father’s voice, he hates his father’s chastising, and he hates that he’s the one who has to suffer because he wasn’t good enough for a horrible man who can’t even hold down a fucking job! He can’t stab his father but he can stab himself, he can drive the enhancements out with a needle like a stake through the heart and every month that he forces all of it back he’s sticking it to his father as well, defying that selfish old man! He’s glad that it hurts because it should hurt, it deserves to hurt because Garak almost died because because of him and he had to go and beg Enabran Tain for knowledge that he could have figured out himself if he wasn’t so fucking scared!

 

_Trying to look smart but not too smart_

_To threaten anything they say_

 

Julian is slow with it. He’s always slow with it. It should be punishing. It should be a brutal and deliberate ritual feeling his muscles start to lose strength, knowing that soon he won’t be able to react fast enough, knowing that he’ll be weak. Soon enough he’ll be like all the rest of them fragile, breakable, _human_. Julian sucks in a breath as he empties the syringe, the last of the serum forced deep into that tissue with a final burn as he withdraws the needle. Julian looks at in him his hand as it starts to shake before throwing it against the wall shattering it. He bites back a scream as his head dips between his knees, that scream sickening, dying in his throat as he holds his head like he’s about to be sick. He bites his lip hard enough to taste the tang of blood and sucks in it.

 

“Fuck,” he whimpers, not going for the dermal regenerator. He won’t touch it until everything is over. It won’t be over quickly. He feels everything start to burn so painfully that he feels like a vampire, sunlight in the room searing his flesh away. Ashes, fire, that’s all that awaits him. That’s what awaits the demons that crawl out of hell to the world of the living. “Fuck,” he sobs again, clutching at his head harder feeling the room spin and the nausea start. He tries to be careful, tries not to rip clumps of hair out before the process is complete. He’ll be dry heaving from the pain soon enough. “Fuck fuck fuck...” is all that escapes his gritted teeth high and pained until he can feel his whole body start to contort, every muscle spasms painfully before he can reach for the potassium. Sometimes it helps. Mostly it does nothing. But it doesn’t matter. It always ends eventually.

 

And then he’ll be normal again.

He’ll be Julian.

For another twenty eight days.


End file.
